Category: Media/Tech Business Models

Thoughts on Ford’s OpenXC: In The Future, Brands With Open Data Will Win

Ford Open XCI spent today at the first-ever Boing Boing Ingenuity, a two-day hackathon cum “vaudeville show” – truly Boing Boing brought to life. It made me so proud to see the essence of conversational marketing at work – a major brand adding deep value to a community, an independent publisher realizing its dream of celebrating its voice and community through a unique event that built up online over many months.

Here’s the Twitter stream. It was really great. And the main insight I took away was this: Brands will soon have no choice but to become data (because we are all becoming data, after all). A car creates tons of data every mile it is driven, for example. Faced with this fact, how might a car brand respond? It could see that data as its private asset, put up fences around it, and make that data really difficult for the driver (and society at large) to access. Or, it could act like Ford did, and tack in the direction of openness.

Ford has created a platform called OpenXC that opens APIs into 50 or so data streams coming out of your car. On the first day of Ingenuity, teams of makers, hackers, and regular folks came up with amazing ideas that leveraged Ford’s innovative platform. For example, one team built an app that senses when a pet or child is in your car, then monitors the car’s internal temperature. If it gets too hot, this app can lower the windows, turn on the AC, and text the car’s owner. I mean, how cool is that?!

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“Peanut Butter Cup Marketing” In A Few Minutes

I had a chance to stop by Bloomberg TV yesterday to talk about “content reachtargeting” and the larger secular trends driving digital marketing today. Here’s the video:

http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?embedCode=B5NzV2ZDrdczexo184RPR5GsjTqwfwXc&playerBrandingId=8a7a9c84ac2f4e8398ebe50c07eb2f9d&width=640&deepLinkEmbedCode=B5NzV2ZDrdczexo184RPR5GsjTqwfwXc&height=360&thruParam_bloomberg-ui%5BpopOutButtonVisible%5D=FALSE

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Four Minutes on the Future of Marketing

Earlier this year I sat down with a videographer at the Bazaarvoice Summit in Austin. He asked me about the future of marketing, in particular as it related to data and consumer behavior. Given what I announced earlier this morning, I thought you might find this short video worth a view. Thanks to Ian Greenleigh for doing all the work!

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Great Content, Meet Great Targeting (And Reach)

Today on the Federated site, I’ve posted a preview of something we’re working on for a Fall release. I’m cross posting a portion of it here, as I know many of you are interested in media and data-driven marketing.

It’s no secret that Federated Media has deep roots in content marketing: We re-imagined CM for the modern web eight years ago, and since then have executed thousands of content-driven programs with hundreds of awesome publishers, services, and brands. “All Brands Are Publishers” has been one of our core mantras since our founding. And each year we run the CM Summit, where the topic of native, content, and conversation-driven marketing across all digital platforms is dissected.

Back when I was first studying the intersection of brand marketing and technology – about the same time as The Search and the founding of FM – I started talking and writing about  “The Conversation Economy.” Its core theme is this: “In the future, all companies must learn how to have 1-1 conversations with their customers at scale, leveraging digital technologies.”

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Liquid Markets Win: On Boats, Planes and Automobiles

Marthas_1775_Blask-wbOne of the key themes in our upcoming book has to do with the interaction of information and the physical world – in particular, how all things physical become “liquid” when activated by just the right information. But when you’re writing (and thinking out loud) about this topic, it’s easy to fall into an academic cadence, because information theory is a thicket – just try reading “The Information” in one sitting, for example.

So I’ve found it’s best to just tell stories instead (and to be honest, I’d wager that nearly all information theory should be reduced to narrative, because narrative is how we as humans make sense of information, but I digress). Here’s a story that happened just this past weekend.

If you’ve been reading for more than a year, you know that I spend a good part of August working on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s a special place where my great grandmother settled in the 19th century, the kind of place where you visit graveyards with your kids to remind them of their own history, then hit a carousel and ice cream shop in the afternoon.

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An Afternoon at the Media Lab: Where The Lines Between Physical and Digital Are Permeable

IcanHasHOloYesterday I took my son to the MIT Media Lab, hallowed ground for me, as reading Stewart Brand’s 1988 “The Media Lab” propelled me toward helping to create Wired magazine, where I edited the founding Director of the Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, for five years (he wrote the back column of the magazine).

For this visit, I met up with David Kong, one of the lab’s alumni wizards, who took us on a whirlwind tour of the place (David’s work on microfluidics is, I believe, some of the most important stuff being done today, but more on that in another post). I spent a day there last summer with Director Joi Ito, and it’s amazing to see how much progress can be made in a year.

Instead of describing everything, I think I’ll let video do the work – one of the Lab’s core values is to always be demo’ing, and my son and I saw half a dozen incredible projects, all demo’d by the people who created them.

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LinkedIn On A Roll

LInote

It’s been pretty obvious from the stock price, but LinkedIn, which I’ve written about every so often, is really on a roll lately. The influencer content play (which I will admit I’ve been part of, in a small way) is a clear winner, the company is enjoying very positive press, and its premium services are getting really interesting as well.

Just today I got an email from the company titled “What’s new with people you know?” I found it compelling in a way that emails from nearly every other service I use – Twitter, Facebook, or Google – are not.  CEO Jeff Weiner tells me that this email has been sent out every six months for the past three years, but it’s clearly been redesigned as more of a media product. I care about my network on LinkedIn, and the email was full of pictures of people who really matter to me, all of whom have gotten new jobs.  It’s  one of the most engaging messages I’ve ever gotten from a “social network.” (In case you want some history, I called LinkedIn out as a media company more than a year ago here.)

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Fred Wilson and I In 18 Minutes

I had a chance to be interviewed with Fred Wilson by Dave Morgan of Simulmedia (and Tacoda and and and…). The video is fun and ranges around from OpenCo to the future of the Web, so I thought I’d share it here:

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Brand Pride

citipride
The Citi float at the Pride Parade in New York. About 200 Citi employees marched behind the float, many riding “Citibikes,” one of Citi’s most visible marketing programs in NYC.

Last week I was fortunate to be in New York City over the weekend, accompanied by most of my family. I had meetings with senior marketing executives at companies like Coke, Citi, and many others, and they stretched from the previous Weds. all the way into Monday of last week. I hate being away on weekends, and my wife is from New York, so she brought my daughters  to visit their grandmother, who lives right in the middle of Manhattan.

Now, a weekend in New York with your family is special anytime, but last weekend was particularly notable because of the annual Pride Parade. This celebration of LGBT rights is one of the largest in the world, and this year’s was historic – just the week before, the Supreme Court had voted down the Defense of Marriage Act, a major civil rights victory for the gay community and, by extension, for citizens across the country. Last Sunday, our family joined tens of thousands of others who cheered the parade down Broadway, marveling at the exuberance and yes, sometimes at the show of skin as well.

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Halfway Into 2013, How’re The Predictions Doing?

1-nostradamusOver the past few years I’ve taken to reviewing my annual predictions once half the year’s gone by. This weekend I realized exactly that had occurred.

It’s been quite a six months, I must say. Personally I took back the reigns at a company I founded in 2005, found a co-author for my book, and hired a CEO for the company I started last year (he starts next week). But I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I’d like here, and that sort of saddens me. However, one of my “half year” resolutions is to change that, and it starts with this review of my Predictions 2013.

This year’s predictions were a bit different in that I wrote about things I *wished* would happen this year, as opposed to those I thought most likely to happen. They were still predictions, but more personal in nature. So let’s see how I did, shall we?

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